Challenge: Extreme Supermoon (Expert Editing*) Collection: Challenges Camera: Canon EOS-5D Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L USM Location: Eastham, MA Date: Mar 19, 2011 Aperture: f/11 ISO: 400 Shutter: 1/3 sec Date Uploaded: Mar 19, 2011
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I got a killer moonset shot (or so I think) so I'm leaving the below for your amusement post-challenge, and entering the new shot. This one has pasted in a properly exposed moon on a properly exposed ground. I wanted the moon a little bigger, so I did that too. Then I stretched the ground horizontally so the reflections matched the slightly bigger moon. That's pretty much it, no fancy-schmancy tone mapping or anything. Noise removal was done.
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I was going to enter this image, a 3-shot composite. It was created as an afterthought; we were there early, we had the tripods set up, we shot the moon with the telephotos and all that. When we set up, there was nobody else there, but by the time of moonrise there was like 25 people on our little spit of land; many mightily impressed by our buffed-up L-glass, I might add :-)
Anyway, after I stepped back down to the car I turned around and saw this little tableau and though "Whoa, that's nice" so I quickly switched to the 17-40, racked the ISO up, and grabbed a few shots.
Handheld.
1/2 second exposures...
The one that worked best for the people became my base exposure. There was another one, similarly framed but the people and the moon were very soft. This one had a much better foreground. So I dropped that in and merged the two foregrounds. Then the moon was too small, so I borrowed a 400mm moon with nice detail from the earlier exposures and laid that in, and shrunk it down so it was not totally outr of proportion. And then, of course, I had to grab the reflections and scale them wider to match the moon. Done and done!
For the rest of it, it's got denoise, gradients top and bottom, some Topaz Simplify, and a bit of local dodging. Really not much processing by my standards, if you forget the creation of the composite.
12 layers total.
The image amuses me, and none of my straight large-moon shots are likely to do very well, so this one it is. Unless we get a killer moonset this morning, of course... |